/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 * contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this
 * work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF
 * licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
 * "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 * You may obtain a copy of the License at
 * 
 * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 * 
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT
 * WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the
 * License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under
 * the License.
 */

package org.apache.commons.codec;

/**
 * <p>
 * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders. This is the sister
 * interface of {@link Encoder}. All Decoders implement this common generic
 * interface.
 * </p>
 * 
 * <p>
 * Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder implementation in the
 * codec package.
 * </p>
 * 
 * <p>
 * One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package.
 * </p>
 * 
 * @author Apache Software Foundation
 * @version $Id: Decoder.java 1075404 2011-02-28 16:17:29Z ggregory $
 */
public interface Decoder {

	/**
	 * Decodes an "encoded" Object and returns a "decoded" Object. Note that the
	 * implementation of this interface will try to cast the Object parameter to
	 * the specific type expected by a particular Decoder implementation. If a
	 * {@link ClassCastException} occurs this decode method will throw a
	 * DecoderException.
	 * 
	 * @param source
	 *            the object to decode
	 * 
	 * @return a 'decoded" object
	 * 
	 * @throws DecoderException
	 *             a decoder exception can be thrown for any number of reasons.
	 *             Some good candidates are that the parameter passed to this
	 *             method is null, a param cannot be cast to the appropriate
	 *             type for a specific encoder.
	 */
	Object decode(Object source) throws DecoderException;
}
